Barney Kulok – Building

In this short, filmed in Verona while on press for Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island, Barney Kulok offers a look at the process of “building” his latest photobook.
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In October 2012, Four Freedoms Park—the last design Louis I. Kahn completed before his untimely death in 1974—will open on Roosevelt Island in New York City, over forty years after its commission as a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Barney Kulok’s black-and-white photographs of the building site function as a meditation on the materiality and formal underpinnings of Kahn’s architectural thinking. Building is at once a historical record and a multilayered visual investigation of form and the subtleties of texture—elements of fundamental importance to Kahn’s philosophies. As architect Steven Holl writes, “Kulok’s photographs free the subject matter from a literal interpretation of the site. They stand as ‘Equivalents’ to the words about material, light, and shadow that Louis Kahn often spoke.”